Natasha Lyonne, pictured here after her 2001 arrest for drink driving, has made a cautious return to screen and stage after a troubled phase in her life. Photograph: AP

In recent weeks there has, of course, only been one story in town for those with a morbid interest in the crashing and burning of former child stars, its subject Lindsay Lohan. Yet, as Century Regional Detention Facility's newly freed inmate adjusts to life after custody, I think it might be worth casting the mind back to another troubled young actor whose unwise life choices capsized her career, but who now may be finally coming up for air – the much-missed Natasha Lyonne.

Now, part of the minor tragedy here is that I can already sense quizzical squints at the mention of her name; a pity, because one short decade ago it was easy to see Lyonne becoming a proper movie star. Her breakthrough came at the age of seven with a regular gig on Pee-Wee's Playhouse (not, with hindsight, the greatest omen). By her late teens, she was ascending professionally at quite the pace, her roles as the narrator of Woody Allen's weightless musical Everyone Says I Love You, and in the note-perfect Slums of Beverly Hills, presenting the world with a tomboyish combination of corkscrew hair and flawless deadpan.

And then began the dizzying personal freefall. The details – asking for her "entertainment lawyer" upon being arrested for drink driving, appearing in court after threatening to sexually molest a neighbour's dog – often made for mordantly compulsive reading, until you remembered there was a human being inside every awful nugget of gossip and apartment trashing. To cut a long, bleak story a little shorter, by the middle of the 00s, Lyonne was in what one might call a very bad place. And on screen - well, she was barely on screen at all, at least not in anything anyone was watching. Finally, even the voyeurs lost interest.

All of which was a crying shame, not only for Lyonne herself, but for anyone with a hankering to see a genuinely new kind of female lead in Hollywood. Because in the brief spell in which she was prospering, she had shown enough wry, spiky vitality to mark herself out as potentially exactly that.

I would, at this point, refer you not to her best-known role in American Pie, but to the aforementioned Slums of Beverly Hills. Tamara Jenkins's beautifully dry comic portrait of a down-at-heel 70s family, roaming nomadically around the mustier corners of southern California, was built around Lyonne's central turn as teenage misfit Vivian Abromowitz. Amid a number of fine performances (and probably the best gag involving a dead cat ever committed to film), it was the scratchy, scowly Lyonne that provided the movie with its charming heart. She was, in that one fleeting moment in 1998, just a hop and a skip from the big league.

It wasn't the only film she illuminated in the same period. But it was the one which, as time passed, served as a permanent reminder not only of how gifted she is, but also how gossamer the line is between success and everything else. Because while Jenkins's movie had secured the usual mix of adulatory reviews and box office returns best described as modest, a few years later came the release of another sweet-natured indie film.

Little Miss Sunshine again featured Lyonne's Slums co-star Alan Arkin at his fractious best, with the story another portrait of a ramshackle clan in transit which, while not exactly ripped off from the earlier film, was tonally its doppleganger. Yet such is fate that, while Little Miss Sunshine spent 2006 delighting audiences en route to two Oscars, Lyonne spent the year between long-term hospitalisation and the dog-related court appearance.

Recently, though – albeit in a manner too relaxed to really be called a comeback – there has been a return to action. A new film is in the can (a campy horror titled All About Evil), and there have been various theatre jobs; anyone interested in finding out more can do so at the IFC blog.

As with any person who's had the kind of problems Lyonne has faced, the most pressing concern is simply for them to find a way to live their life in peace. But much as at least some of the frenzy around LiLo rightly raised her talent as an actress, the selfish part of me is also delighted that maybe filmgoers haven't seen the last of Natasha Lyonne after all.